Broken
by gimmeabreakxD
Summary: We write our lives in blood, on paper made of skin, with hands that shake in second-guessing. In the end, when all is said and done, when layers upon layers of time have been peeled, we're all just broken inside, like little porcelain dolls.
1. One

**Broken**

* * *

_One_

* * *

It left with the snow that day, his indifference, and never came back. The rain was slate-gray, gunmetal-gray, the same shade of gray as the sky. Frosty, chilly, like sleet—but not quite. Inches above the ground, above rooftops, mist hovered: droplets leaping off the surfaces, splashing up, only to fall back down. Fat globules poured in spears and vertical chutes, and if you squinted and tilted your head you might have seen the individual raindrops as shafts of javelin. Goddess, are you so merciful that you couldn't send down a volley of real javelins? Punish the world for all it's worth. He sniffed and thought he detected the scent of wild rhododendrons somewhere within the rain, underneath the whiff of wet pavement.

The sound of downpour fascinated him: it gushed and roared, it pounded, it swept; but on closer scale, somewhere nearer, smaller, in a trickling undertone, the diminutive plicks and plocks of each raindrop were still audible. On porches, on windowsills, on puddles collected inside dips in the road, in spaces roof tiles once occupied. Above his head, it hammered with dull thuds, bouncing on his umbrella. Plickity-plickity-plick. Like bees banging on a windshield. When the heavens wept, its tears slithered everywhere.

"Boy, when it rains, it really does pour, doesn't it?" She stood under the striped yellow-and-white café awning. A grin stretched her mouth, a childish one; her cheeks bulged, like a chipmunk's. Nauseatingly cheerful: two-dimensional, almost. Strands of her hair, dry ones, curled up in wisps; the damp ones clung to her shirt, dark ribbons snaking round the yellowed fabric. On her sleeve a wet spot the shape of a diamond bloomed. The balls of her shoulders glistened. He considered shooing her away.

"You're going to catch a cold."

"I know. That's why I'm waiting for the rain to stop."

"Use an umbrella."

"I don't have one."

"Wait inside."

She laughed. "Are you trying to get rid of me?" The hem of her skirt was wet and she didn't even know it. She shifted her weight to one foot, and then to the other, hugging herself. The woman had no idea how to keep still.

"You're going to catch a cold," he said again.

"Cam, why don't you tell that to yourself? You're standing out there, and I'm safe under here."

He shrugged. If he ignored her long enough, she might take it as her cue to leave him alone. Thunder rumbled overhead, the kind that rolls from left to right, tumbling like an unfurled map, shrinking as it went. The clouds seemed to have thickened since he last looked up: cumulus, they were, wrinkled at the edges and plump in the middle. If clouds could talk, these ones would have said, Don't hold your breath, honey, we're not letting up. Ominous clouds, outlined black. Who needs silver linings, anyway?

"You know the gerbera seeds I bought ages ago?" she said. Still standing there, shifting her weight, catching raindrops on her palm. How persistent.

He nodded before he could stop himself; he hoped she didn't catch it. She did.

"They're in bloom now. Pretty things, aren't they?"

He shrugged again. One more and he would probably dislocate his shoulders. It wasn't that he found her irritating; if he had to be honest, she seemed like a nice person. The problem, then, lay in him. The thought made him smirk: It's not you, darling; it's me. I don't like the rain, and you're in it, therefore I don't like you.

"Aren't you cold out there?" Her head was tilted, her eyes squinting. Probably she had trouble seeing him clearly in the rain. She had to talk louder than normal, too, so her voice would carry over to where he stood; only she gauged their distance wrong and her voice sounded too loud to him, even with the deluge roaring all around them. "You could close up for the day, you know. Chances are nobody's out walking in this weather."

"You were."

"I'm an exception."

"Because you're not normal," he said under his breath.

Did she just stick her tongue out at him? "Heard that."

Devil's ears. Why couldn't she read his mind while she was at it? Depression might do her good; take away a hefty chunk of that waterproof sunniness and force-feed her the bleak realities of life.

She took a step closer. Now she stood at the edge of the awning. Her shoes were darkened by the puddles, her ankles splattered with mud and raindrop splashes. A waif left on someone's doorstep, whipped through puberty and plunked right in the middle of adulthood. There were times when he caught himself thinking that perhaps she wasn't done with childhood yet, that on cold nights she drew the blankets around her and wished that Mommy and Daddy were in the next room, sleeping.

"One more step and you're wet."

She lifted her shoulders and let them fall. "I know. It doesn't matter, you know, seeing I'm already half-drenched as it is."

Half-drenched his foot. Better half-drenched that fully drenched, but sense was one thing Lillian appeared to be lacking. If she didn't change out of her clothes anytime soon, she was liable to catch a cold. "Are you so stubborn that you'd risk getting sick just to annoy me?"

"I annoy you, Cam?"

This remark he chose to ignore. He turned his face heavenward and met the underside of his umbrella, discernible through the octopus-arm aluminum spokes, pockmarked by circular raindrops and rivulets trickling down the slope to the inverted-scallop edge. All on the other side of the membrane, all above, on the wet side, yet visible from below. It seemed symbolic, this translucence. Then again, everything seemed symbolic in the rain.

Heavenward. Why is there a heavenward but not a hellward? Or better yet, to complete the awkward family picture, a purgatoryward? This train of thought posed a problem: heavenward was up, hellward was down. Simple enough. But if purgatory does exist, where would it be? Certainly not in the clouds, where heaven curls up and naps, nor deep in the earth's belly, so close to the mouth of hell. In a mountaintop, perhaps, an overgrown courtyard, a ghost ship stranded at sea.

These kinds of thoughts would be his undoing.

A movement at the café window caught his attention. The rain made it hard to be sure, but he thought he saw a face there, long and angular, peering around the dusty floral curtains.

Of course. Howard. Who else would it be? Look at him, with his face pressed right up to the pane, his forehead and nose and palms and the pads of his fingers flattened to pale circles. Watching Cam and Lillian as if they were a play staged just for him, as if they were a private soap opera on a shoestring budget. He saw Cam looking and smiled; and the smile was bursting with implications. Cam hated implications more than he hated meddlesome folks. Oh, Howard, you big loveable oaf. Dear as a father, but nosy as hell.

Better get it over with, then. Cam walked over to Lillian. "Come on." He gave his umbrella a shake; raindrops flew off.

She was quiet, staring up at him. Her face was dewy, sheeny, covered by a thin film of moisture, denser around the forehead and nose; water droplets clung to her eyebrows but none on the lashes. But why would he look for droplets on her lashes? Such a romanticized thing to do—he blamed Howard again, with his cheap paperbacks left lying everywhere in the café. Take the rose-tinted glasses off and stare at the mud, at the garbage, at the heaps of filth that littered the world. Bitter, isn't it?

Lillian cleared her throat. Tiny thing, that woman; the same height as Laney. Oh, and _now_ she'd gone still. Why stop your fidgeting, he thought, now that I can see you?

"Come on," he said again. "I don't have all day."

"Why?"

Howard's eyes were still on them. Cam knew it by instinct; he could see the grin in his mind, the carmine-painted Cheshire grin, widening and pushing up the fleshy milkmaid cheeks, teeth gleaming. A smile without a body, all eyes and mouth. Go on, it said, with ten fingers steepled underneath. What will you do next?

"Look. You have to get home, right?" She nodded. "Then I'll get you home."

She started fidgeting again. "You don't have to."

"Will you just get in here, please? Now."

Beggars can't be choosers. With a feeble glare she scurried over and pressed close to him, away from the rain dripping off the sides, keeping her elbows tucked in. She wasn't lying about being half-drenched, though. The tips of her hair were wet; they hung in clumps, limp and sodden, darker than the rest of the strands. The back of her skirt was soaked to the waist.

When she stepped under the penumbral dryness an invisible threshold was breached. A line was crossed, a border toed too deep, the gates pulled open. In an instant she was his friend, simply because they shared an umbrella too small for two, because the same ridged dome of periwinkle polyester hovered over their heads at the same time, because they were two shivering souls huddled from the rain, dividing the same scrap of waterless air between them. Who knew umbrellas could develop camaraderie? It had to be psychological.

"Thank you," she said. Her voice was close. Too close. "I owe you one."

He shrugged and felt his shoulder brush against hers. Now his sleeve was damp as well. Because hers was damp, so, too, was his: If you're cold, comrade, let me share your burden. In sickness and in health and all that. "You don't owe me anything," he said. "Come on."

They walked together with care, footsteps synchronized, avoiding puddles and miniature waterfalls pouring off the rooftops. All along he was aware of her right beside him, watching her feet, one of her hands clutching the umbrella stem. That was her elbow digging into his flank, and oh Goddess, his sleeve really was wet now: a lock of damp hair stuck to it.

What was the point of using an umbrella if he was going to get soaked all the same? He almost regretted his impulsive gallantry. Cam never liked the rain anyway—except when he was indoors.

"What made you so kind today?"

"Nosy people."

She peered up at him, one eyebrow raised. "I hope you're not referring to me."

"You're nosy, but no, I wasn't referring to you." She stepped on his foot, not altogether accidentally. It left a streak of mud on his shoe. He cleared his throat. "Howard was watching us back there."

"Ah."

"Don't _ah_ me. You know what he was up to."

"Never said I didn't. Hey, watch it!" She gripped the umbrella stem and pulled it towards her; his left shoulder caught raindrops that soaked right through his shirt. "I'm drenched on this side. Why don't you let me hold the umbrella instead?"

"I'm taller."

"I can hold it high enough."

"I'm taller," he said again, brooking no argument. "And it's mine."

They reached her house half-sodden. His socks—his socks, by Goddess!—were moist and cold, squishy whenever he wriggled his toes. Disgusting thing. He hoped hers were just as damp, although he was never sure whether she wore socks or not. If she did, he hoped they were wet. If she didn't, he hoped her shoes were sloshing with rainwater.

"Thank you," she said, one hand on the doorknob. The smile she wore made her cheeks bulge. Chipmunk. The only thing missing was the oversized front teeth. "Without you, I wouldn't have made it home dry and in one piece."

He snorted in amusement. "I could do without the sarcasm, thanks."

"Really, though." She twisted the knob and pushed the door open. "I appreciate it. Thank you." And with that, she disappeared inside the house, leaving him standing in the rain, noticing for the first time how big his umbrella was without her.

* * *

**_a/n:_**

_lol I have no idea what I'm doing._


	2. Two

**Broken**

* * *

_Two_

* * *

Wildflowers burst from the grass, from within ankle-deep blades of silver-green, flared yellow petals propped on lanky stalks. A pair of leaves, three. Four at most. Innocent creatures looking for the sun, shivering with frissons induced by the wind. A little higher, darlings, a little more to the east. See that bright circle over there? Yes, there's your precious sun. Drink the rays in and grow, and someday you may be lucky enough to get trampled on by the mayor himself.

Cam yawned and loosened his tie with two fingers: it was never tight to begin with, but as they say, old habits die hard.

The shallow brook reflected her face as she peered in. She was in a chipper mood today, even more so than usual. He only had to crack a half-hearted joke for that chipmunk grin to break out; more often than not a gasping breeze of laughter gushed with it, a single rush of breath: Hah.

It unsettled him, that smile. It was twice as bright as any, so much so that he could only conclude it was fabricated, designed to hide, to shield, wrought by a mechanical hand at some point: a warped veneer fashioned from dreams and nightmares alike, at the fork where the real and the fake went on separate ways. True, at the moment everything he had was guesswork, but only time will tell—let time do its job and the chink in the armor will show, betray a glint, a tell-tale glimmer. She was humming below her breath.

You're not as two-dimensional as you want me to think, honey. You're not that opaque.

"Cam," she said, not taking her eyes off the green-and-brown mallards waddling about. "Are you happy?"

"Not particularly. Not sad, either. Neutral, I suppose."

She laughed her single breath of laughter. "No, I mean with your life. Are you happy with where you are, what you're doing?"

Beyond the hems of his pants two shoes stuck out, buffered by a band of pasty skin each. Jarring: a stretch of deep navy, and then the pastel pale of his ankles. Dark and light colliding, the natural and the manufactured. The pair of pants itself appeared to be tailored for someone else, someone less tall and possessed more meat on his bones. Blue-black tubes of cloth under-stuffed with flesh, laid straight in front of him, with a written instruction that said, These are your legs, these are your feet, deal with it.

"I could do worse," he said.

The look she gave him was somewhat condescending. Pitying, even, should he choose to read in too much. "That's not an answer."

He sighed in exasperation. Why he kept choosing to spend time with her was beyond him; she was especially predisposed to asking the most baffling kinds of questions: Are you satisfied with what life has given you, Cam? Do you think life is unfair, Cam? Don't you ever feel restless, Cam, like a bird without a nest? Cam this, Cam that. What is love? If you're given the chance to live your life again, what will you change? Life, life, life. For all her cheerfulness, her questions sure were depressing. "Yes, I'm happy. Not so much that I want to jump for joy, but happy nonetheless."

He closed his fist and tugged upwards; torn clumps of grass stuck out from between his fingers, roots dangling. Sorry, grass, he thought. Compulsive behavior on my part.

A black ant crept along his arm.

"Don't you want to be that happy? So happy that you can't help but jump for joy."

Cam shrugged. "Not particularly."

"No?"

"It would be nice if I could be that happy," he said, "but I don't actively pursue it. If it comes, it comes."

"Hmm."

Her fingers skimmed the water, slender bird-boned things, tanned above and pale below. When she wasn't talking, you could mistake her for a woman of nobility, someone from the past, from those old pastel portraits of rosy-cheeked ladies with their frocks and bonnets, with their hair combed and gathered at the nape, with their hands fish-belly white and their lips painted crimson. It was in the way she moved: a trace of dignified wave in her hands, a tilt of the head. The impeccable posture. The only exception was whenever she fidgeted.

Sunlight hit the water and bounced, caught on the underside of her palms, on her jaw, on her cheeks. Under her breasts. Shards of dappled light dancing, yellow-and-white flecks of fire trapped in perpetual motion, grated pieces of the sun watered down, made earthly. If he was an artist, he would have painted her. No, not her—the idea of her, of a modern-day milkmaid-slash-noblewoman, a reincarnation of the sun cracked like an egg.

"Don't stare," she said, chiding. "It's rude."

"Don't tell me how to live my life."

Chipmunk. That smile again. Faked, perfected through years of practice, summoned with such ease that she might have begun to believe it herself. She didn't fool him, though. He had little doubt that the smile she wore hid something underneath, some sort of restlessness, a discontentment she chose to vent through her pseudo-philosophical questions. The current below a frozen river, a flash behind drawn curtains. A hint of decay underneath the perfume. Your mask is crumbling, Lillian, and I can see it. After all, even the sun has dark spots.

He brought a fist to his mouth and yawned again, this time almost dislocating his jaw. Almost. He was prone to hyperboles at the worst of times.

"Cam."

"Lillian."

"If people are flowers, what would I be?"

Now that was an interesting question. A nice diversion from her usual life-and-happiness routine. Problem was, he never thought of people as flowers, or vice versa. Creativity he never lacked, but he was short of the imagination to sort through people, to take inventory of their traits, to turn them around in his hands, to categorize them as flowers. You're a lily, you're a petunia. You're a sunflower, because you stink. You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting.

_Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin._

Imagine: Yes, Howard, stand there at the corner. Laney, in the middle, beside Georgia. No, don't stand too close to Rose; you're supposed to be the accent. Stand straight, Eileen—you're wilting.

Arranging people as if they were flowers. Playing Goddess. You go here, you stand there. Face the wall and think about what you've done. Imagine the power, the authority, the sovereign responsibility: I am the judge, I am the king.

And people thought he was laid-back.

"Cam?"

"I'm thinking." He took his flat cap off and raked his fingers through his hair. "A foxglove."

Her brow furrowed. In curiosity, he hoped. "A foxglove?"

"A foxglove."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Because I say so." Candidly, he picked foxglove because it was the first flower that came to mind. The first word he thought of was carrot, but blurting that out was a threat to his self-preservation. He crossed his legs and uncrossed them. Grass tickled his ankles: Wear longer pants next time, Romeo, they seemed to say. Lucky there weren't ticks around.

"I don't find foxgloves particularly pretty." With a finger on her chin, her eyes downcast, her legs tucked neatly beneath her, she was the perfect image of demureness. Like a porcelain doll without its lipsticked mouth and painted eyes, without whorls of satiny hair curled tight around the ears. Without eyeleted lace trimmings and rustling triple-flounced skirts. Stripped and broken and left to pretend. Hah.

* * *

**_Deceive_**

_ Verb_

_1. (of a person) Cause (someone) to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain some personal advantage._

_See also: delude, beguile, mislead_

* * *

Ah, yes. Let's pretend, shall we?

Here's your ivory comb, baby, and here's your ball gown. Here's your white silk gloves, here's your floppy hat with the pink ribbon you like so much, here's your pearl choker necklace. Your cedar cigar box, your diamond earrings, your embroidered suede boots. Dress yourself up like the prodigal princess you are, you sweet broken doll, you.

Cam knew all this fancy nonsense because of Laney. Little Laney, with her braids piled tight on top of her head like an external brain, forcing little Cam to play house, forcing little Ash to behave while little miss Blondie poured him imaginary tea.

And now it was Lillian's turn.

"What does that say about how I see you?"

Her lips curled to a smile. She took her hand away from her chin and used it to brush a strand of hair from her eyes. Her little porcelain-doll glass eyes. "That I'm toxic?"

He shook his head and smiled. "My turn. What barnyard animal would I be?" Even as he talked, he hoped she'd say cat. Kitten. Feline. Anything that meowed and had whiskers, bent tails and arched backs. Striped fur, spotted fur, bandy legs. As long as it had something to do with cats.

"You're already a barnyard animal," she said. Either she didn't notice his disappointment or she ignored it. "Let's go with crops instead."

"All right. What vegetable would I be?"

Without missing a beat, she said: "A carrot."

Well, would you look at that, thought Cam. Great minds think alike. He refused to comment on her vegetable choice and babbled instead about something unrelated.

"Laney used to have a porcelain doll." Somewhere at the back of his mind, beyond the barbed-wired border of practical intelligence, flicking through the surface of his thoughts, a voice asked him why he was telling her this. Cam ignored the voice; it sounded too much like his own. "She called it Her Majesty Elena the Second."

"Oh? And who was the first?"

"Laney."

She stared at him for more than a few seconds before breaking out into a toothy grin. "Oh," she said, laughing. "Oh. I get it."

Playing with dolls, playing Goddess. Miniaturization at its finest: little Cheryl was best at it. Cam had glimpsed her once manipulating her toy horses, her stuffed sheep, her rubber cats, her barnyard figurines. Lining them up, side by side, like a firing squad. Even animals weren't exempted. You are whoever I want you to be.

And me?

I think, therefore I am. _Cogito ergo sum_ and all that. Nothing like Latin gibberish to make a man feel intelligent.

These thoughts would be his undoing, one of these days.

"You remind me of it," he said.

The laughter stopped. She twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger, the hair that had clung to his shoulder that rainy day more than a month ago. He was never sure of her hair color: brown seemed too plain, auburn too red, chestnut too dark, dirty blond too light. In the end, he went with brown.

"How so?"

He breathed in the scent of grass and spring wildflowers, breathed in the clear sunshine and brook water, breathed in the noise of mallards with their webbed feet paddling beneath the surface. And he said: "It was broken."

Shattered.

Splintered.

Lillian closed her eyes and shook her head. Looked at him and smiled. Not the fake chipmunk grin; this was different. Mouth closed, stretched, eyes reduced to crescents, like tapered rainbows, like inverted mouths beaming, purple irises. A sad, abandoned doll. A bony urchin. A dejected soul appraised and discarded, hidden by the sun, by a cheery smile and manual labor.

All this time, he thought. All this time, you've been hiding behind your animals, behind your five-star crops.

"Cam," she said. Her voice was quiet. "Everyone's a little broken inside. Even you." She sighed. "But you know what?"

"What?"

This time it was the chipmunk grin that showed. "The most broken ones are the hardest to grind."

She was a ball of fire crammed inside a tiny bodice. A king-size mattress shoved into a drawer, buried six feet underground, bursting at the dovetailed seams. A walking time bomb waiting to happen. Steeped with volatile emotions, clogged by a staunch belief in sickening cheerfulness.

"Cam?"

"Lillian."

Sunlight enfolded half of her face, her oily nose glinting, the other half shrouded within speckled leaf-shadows. She leaned forward. "Cam, do you think I'm crazy?"

The shadowed collarbones dipped with every movement of her shoulders. She was a lovely mottled shade: irregularly tanned and pasty, ochre-brown-pink, depending on which swathe of skin showed.

It was his turn to twist his mouth into a jaunty grin, to apply a jocular set to his jaw. "Everyone's a little crazy inside, you know. And," he continued, grazing her cheek with his fingers, "the craziest ones are the hardest to grind."

* * *

_**a/n:**_

_And thus begins the downward spiral._

_I finally figured out where I'm taking this, and it's a road to bittersweet endings. Maybe even plain bitter. A word of warning: this is not a happy honeypot of love and marshmallow fluff. See, I've even changed the category to Angst._

_Each chapter jumps about a month or so. At least, that's the plan._

_Thank you, all of who you reviewed and favorited and followed. All of you who read what I write. I appreciate your support so, so much. I only wish I could express it better. _


	3. Three

**Broken**

* * *

_Three_

* * *

The sleeping sky stretched overhead, its belly hanging downward, like a mountain in reverse. These days it seemed to him that the heavens never took on the color it should: today it wore a silver cloak, the kind of silvery sheen that sky-blue reverted to before rain, before the clouds arched their backs, twisted their souls and cried.

Cry for me, will you? Cry for her. For both of us.

The world just didn't have enough tears in it for everyone. Any man who wanted his share must ask for it, beg for it, go down on his knees and press his forehead to the ground, kiss the packed earth and murmur a fervent prayer. Cry for me, cry for her. A man must clasp his hands together and tremble before approaching winds, slit his arm and let his blood trickle to the grass, ruby droplets that smelled of rust. Cry, cry for us.

"That's your third this month," he said.

She frowned and clamped her teeth around her hooked thumb, enameled tombstones boring into flesh. Bruise-like shadows hugged the flaccid skin under her eyes, mauve-tan circles edged yellow, cradling each bowed contour sunk deep in her skull. Pinched eyes, hooded, tired and jaded, flattened to polished discs. Her cheeks had lost their shiny apple-plumpness, hollowed sacs they were now, her face sheared of wadded fat: a balloon deflated, squeezed to wrinkled emptiness. Chin sharper, mouth thinner, eyes duller.

Her complexion spoke of prolonged stretches of time spent indoors, within bars of time, of weak will: a cadaverous pallor washed with a broad sweep of lilac, contoured sallow ochre at the inner folds of her elbows, at the hollow of her throat.

Her body was aging faster than time was used to.

She trembled. Shivered, although it wasn't cold. A dark streak of dirt ran up her forearm; her bird-fingers jerked and grappled with each other—frenetically, it seemed. Compulsively. She rubbed her hands together, washing them under a tap of air, scouring the spaces between her fingers, in the downward slopes between bony knuckles. Eyes glassy. Wrists narrow, shot through with blue veins. Voice shaky. A muscle under her eye twitched.

The word "wreck" came to mind.

"Everyone's worried about you," he said.

She laughed. A laughter warbled, twisted, gasping: Ah-ah-ah. Cough-like, as though her throat were blockaded by a lump of phlegm marbled with blood, as though she had forgotten how to laugh, as though there was nothing left to laugh about. As if life were a bad joke, a tedious play staged over and over, with blasé actors reciting in beeping monotone, meaningless as molted insect shells.

"Who's everyone?" She scratched at the inner corner of her eye. "Tell me who everyone is."

"Us. All of us."

"Tell 'em it won't happen again."

"Don't you understand? It's you we're worried about, not the animals."

A cricket chirped, the sound of rock grating against rock: creeeeeak, creeeeeak. Elbows planted on her knees, she let her head fall into her hands, fingers kneading the skin around her temples. Tangled hair tumbled across her shoulder and curtained her face from him, and yet he knew she was grinning, her mouth bent into a sloppy curve, her teeth stained yellow. Too much coffee.

Too much everything.

"The problem with sheep," she said, "is that whatever their sickness is, the symptoms are always the same."

"Lillian—"

"They freeze." Her head snapped up; her eyes, red-rimmed, watery, pinned him to where he sat, halted his protests halfway out of his mouth. He smelled coffee on her breath. "They grow stiff, they topple to one side. Pneumonia, abscess, bloat—it's all the same."

"Hey," he said.

"Ross was the third this month. Starved to death, if you believe what Ash has to say."

"Have you been eating well?"

"Yes. No." She tugged at her hair and stared at the limp strands that came out. "Define 'well'."

"Lillian."

She reached out and covered his mouth with her hand. It smelled of moss and old grass, slick with sweat, textured like rough paper. "Don't talk," she said. "I know what you're gonna say."

Cam took her wrist and led her hand away. It was thin, her wrist: his thumb and middle finger encircled it and overlapped. The eyes that stared at him were dull and bright at once, glazed over, with a final lack of ebullience that had lurked behind the lenses, in the reddened corners where eye-meat showed. You're slipping, dearest, he thought. You're slipping away and you don't even know it.

The clothes on her back gave off a whiff of dampened earth and horse sweat, and under that, curdled milk. The mingled scents of barnyard mayhem. Not disgusting; just human. A human being, stripped of cosmetics and scented shampoo. Of citrus soap, of pressed blouses and starched sleeves, of perfumed ears. Of a powdered nose and a laundered skirt. She had never looked so human. She could have lain spread-eagled on the ground and Mother Earth herself would have embraced her with mottled soil-arms, enfolded her in a tender wreath of leaves and kept her in the warmth of the world's bosom, nursed her as a lost child. A child of dust and red clay and unshed tears.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Till death us do part.

"You drink too much coffee," he said.

She laughed again. Ah-ah-ah. He wondered whatever happened to her old single-breath laughter. Probably peeled away with the crumbly mask of sunniness, dissolved with the advent of caffeine-stained teeth, gulped down her throat in a coil of gummy nights spent staring at the ceiling. Buried under candy-wrapper grins and perfect turnips, at the bottom of the wastebasket. Where are you, Lillian, where do you think you're going?

If there was anything keeping her together, it must have been frayed by now. Frayed and tangled, pulled taut between sacrificial poles, on the verge of snapping. How appropriate: She herself was close to snapping, the surface cracks deepening, reaching downward, outward. Crack, crackle, crack. A tremor here, a snivel there. Sit back and watch the dam burst.

"How'd you know?" She fingered the hem of her apron and yanked at a loose thread. It came off without much resistance, unlacing the even stitches, crimpled and curled, like the branches of an ancient tree. Or an old rope, suspended from the ceiling beam.

"Howard told me."

"Howard told you?"

"And I smell it on your breath."

Ah-ah-ah. Even emaciated, she was beautiful when she smiled. A black rose: the beauty in death. Subtle elegance in entropy, wisps of bittersweet nostalgia in degeneration.

"Howard won't sell me anything alcoholic. And I don't like sake." Beads of sweat clung to her upper lip; she wiped it with a stained sleeve. "I wish I knew what's wrong with me."

He raised his hand to place it on her nape, under the heavy mat of her hair. The skin on the back of her neck, where the bend dipped into a pure, sweet curve, was moist and sticky to touch; he ran his thumb across it and felt clustered growths of hair swirling inward. Strangely, he found it a pleasant sensation. He stroked it again; she shivered.

He sensed it, the despair. Thick, black, oozing. It trickled through him from the pores of her nape, wrapped writhing ribbons around his foot, dragged him down, down, deeper into the earth, past the bedrock and underground limestone shelves and connate water, while everything else rose up, high above his head, until he was the only one left at the bottom of a windswept canyon. All that from a single touch. One little contact.

So, he thought. This is how it feels to fall. This is how it feels to despair.

This camaraderie, what was it called again? Empathy. Yes, that was it: I'll share your burden. In sickness and in health. You jump, I jump.

If he could only siphon the blackness out, collect it in a pail, upend it on the grass. Hah. As if despair could be extracted out of her, out of anyone, pulled clean through the mouth, aired out like a mattress drying in the sun. Like dust billowing from a wool rug beaten by a stick. Out, despair, I command thee. And despair, with its fanged maw and horned brows, with its blue lips and wintry fingers, would sneer and thumb its nose at him, stick its hip at a jolly angle. As if you could do anything, it would shout. As if you were actually somebody.

How does it feel to be so powerless, Cam? How does it feel to listen and do nothing?

"You're not getting much sleep, are you?"

"No." Lillian started bouncing her leg. "No. My brain won't shut up long enough for me to sleep."

"I'm really worried about you. I really am. If there's anything I can do—"

"Shush." She shrugged his hand off her nape and leaned her head on his shoulder. It was a gesture he recognized with a dull pang; she used to do it all the time, when she was still in one piece, when her smiles were real and her questions sincere. "People like us," she said, "we live in the margins."

"The margins?"

"You know, the white spaces between blocks of print. We're stuck, unwritten. We're the little people."

"And the big ones?"

"The big ones make the headlines. This guy discovers the cure for cancer, this other guy finds the fountain of youth. Wham, bam, straight to the front page, congratulations, you're a newsmaker." She drew circles in the air with her forefinger and made a wet, popping noise in her mouth. Clop-clop, it went. "They'll die in the end, too, of course. But at least they've done something with their lives."

Thud, thud, thud. He swallowed with a dry, painful gulp. His pulse drummed in his ears, a toad lodged high in his throat, beating all the while. For some reason, for some unknown, irrational reason, she made him nervous. No, not nervous—not accurate enough. Afraid was the word; scared, terrified, like a child alone in his bedroom at night, dreading the monsters under his bed; like a man peering at the lip of a gorge, at the point where rock gives way to air, where the outcrop shoots straight down into the darkness below.

You jump, I jump.

If he were on the outside looking in, if he were some kind of invisible spectator hovering overhead, he would have seen himself as just another young man sharing a honeyed moment with his lover. Another moment steeped in blissful ignorance, just a man and a woman talking, whispering sweet nothings, mindful of nothing but each other, chaste as a bar of yellow sunlight.

The pivotal act, the passionate tête-à-tête between quasi-lovers, the murmuring of eager words to each other's necks, sitting together on a weathered wooden bench mantled in the freckled umbrage of flowering dogwoods. Red dots on the grass, blood-splatter petals, wildflowers. Slanting sunshine from the west, a bit of mist, some lackadaisical chirping of unseen birds. Never mind that the hero was scared stiff, or the heroine falling apart, breaking down, collapsing to the ground.

Surfaces were all that mattered. That's why people kept polishing their surfaces, scrubbing and dusting and waxing until their own faces were reflected back at them, all saccharine smiles and flossed teeth: Oh, look, honey, I can see myself from here, what a shiny life we've got. Just don't let them inside, okay, don't let them see what's inside.

"You've opened the tunnel," he said. At the moment he would have said anything to keep her from thinking the way she did. "You've reconciled the mayors. You've practically improved the local economy because of your crops. You've—"

"That's me, the unsung hero. Lillian to the rescue. Lillian saves the day."

The Golden Girl tarnished. The regal princess who tumbled off her throne, a heap of silk and taffeta on the dais, white stockinged legs sticking out of piled tulle. A priceless painting vandalized, shredded, trodden into the mud, pawed, violated. It pained him to see her like this. She was someone whom everyone looked up to, a role model, an impregnable drop of sunlight in the darkest of nights. What happened, where was the woman who had befriended everyone, who had responded to requests without a moment's hesitation?

"Don't talk like that," he said.

"Have you ever wanted more from life, Cam?" Without waiting for an answer, she continued, "I have. I keep asking myself where I'm going, what I'm doing. It keeps me awake at night. I don't know anymore. Am I going to be here forever? Forever sowing seeds, milking cows? Because, if you think about it, sooner or later everyone dies anyway, so why put so much effort into living?"

She couldn't possibly be saying… No. No, never. And yet he felt her slithering through his fingers, dripping off, slipping away like sand, like water.

"Don't talk like that."

"I want my life to amount to something. Something that doesn't blow away with the wind. But, you know, there's just no point. If I'm gonna die someday, why take the long road? What difference would it make if I choose to die today instead of—"

"Don't talk like that." If she noticed the break in his voice, she did a well enough job concealing it. "Please. You're just—you're just tired. I think you need a break, that's all."

There was silence. She lifted her head and stared at him with those hard, polished, sunken eyes. For a moment he had an inkling that perhaps she was trying to tell him something without using words, burning the message from eye to eye, sending it through the June breezes. Whatever the message was, it never reached him.

"Yes, maybe," she said, looking away. "I ought to go somewhere, you know, just to relax for a bit. I guess I'm just restless."

Restless and searching for the meaning of life. Many others before her had plodded through that path and met dead ends. Others have forged their way through clumps of bushes and scraggly undergrowth, through deserts, over mountains, across seas. Through the twisting corridors of their own minds. Some gave up halfway, the rest persevered. Every single one found only stony silence waiting for them in the end, its legs crossed, its mouth twisted to a sardonic grin: Like what you see?

Stony silence and nothingness. Bleak, numbing emptiness.

"You'd tell me if you're leaving, wouldn't you?"

She smiled. "Of course I would."

She left the very next day without so much as a note for him.

* * *

_**a/n:**_

_This chapter left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know why._

_Anyway, thanks to everyone who reviewed!_

**Maddie** |** Strikey-Chan** |** fairy-san **|** Theundesiredones** |** fantasyanimegirl283** |** TopazSunshine **|** Pseudopsychotic Pickles** |** Guest **_(Good catch. Haha.)_

_And, as always, thank you so much for reading. Reviews are very much appreciated. :)_


	4. Four: Epilogue

**Broken**

* * *

_Four: Epilogue_

* * *

The summer sky reminds me of many things; I can't remember which ones. It's a transient, the sky, ever changing yet ever constant, the same yet not the same. A different creature whenever I look up, the same slab of marbled space since the beginning of time: Today it's blue, three shades too vibrant, a domed ocean overhead. Wide, open, unsullied. No clouds. It's too blue, too beautiful, that it's almost oceanic, almost rippling with labyrinthine waves, and I keep expecting to see schools of fish fly by. It's the kind of blue that you could drown in, if you're not careful.

It's the sort of blue that follows you around like a stray dog, even when you close your eyes. The same shade of blue that reaches at you with reedy fingers, the kind you could smell from wherever you stand, however you try to cover your nose. It smells, I think, like something burning.

* * *

She visits me every night. In my dreams, that is. She looks different from what I remember, although I suppose everyone looks different in dreams: a little twisted, maybe, a little warped, a little blurred at the edges.

In my recollections of her she's never whole; most of the time she's a disembodied voice floating around my elbows, a fading echo from somewhere dark: Are you happy, Cam? Are you happy? Sometimes she's a fluttering hand, a strip of pale calf, a dirt-streaked arm. The color brown, too, and barnyard odors. One time she was a grinning mouth, a satiny carmine bow pelted by the rain. All cut-off body parts, little snippets of her, gathered in a pile, bound between squared pieces of time and sewn together, a compilation of her anatomy with some of the pages slashed off. Like a doll dismembered, scissored away at the joints.

Torn asunder: That sounds better, if not more saturnine.

I remember her wrists, though, the inside of them. Thin, bird-boned, streaked purplish-blue, creased like everyone else's. A combination of comeliness and frailty I used to associate with card-houses, paper napkins, even kittens. I remember, just now, how papery her skin was, as if it weren't skin at all, but an endless roll of fine parchment draped around her, fitted into corners and niches, in the crooks of her elbows, for her to write on when she's lonely.

If she had ever written anything on her wrists, I would have read them. Over and over, in a boundless loop, like a merry-go-round, going back to where everything began. Again, again, again.

* * *

Penny for your thoughts, Ash says.

He's ageless, Ash: too old to be young, too young to be old. Time bends itself around him, hovering but not touching, so the air around him ages into a wrinkled sheet of stiff plastic, yet he himself remains youthful. It's possible that he's stuck somewhere in the past, parted with his soul at some point in time; or, better yet, his youth is too opaque to be pierced by the needles time throws at him.

You'd better have ten, I say.

He laughs at this. Not Ah-ah-ah, not even Hah. Just laughter, plain and raw, the same as yours, as mine, as Eileen's or Georgia's.

Thinking about her? he asks.

I nod and say: Don't I always?

I think she's happy, wherever she is.

I nod again. Of course, I say. Wherever she is.

* * *

_"I don't find foxgloves particularly pretty."_

_"What does that say about how I see you?"_

_"_…_That I'm toxic?"_

* * *

There are birds out. I hear them up on their trees, twittering to themselves, like little flutes played by a dying breath. Like poorly oiled door hinges creaking in the wind. Or rusted swings, the sort you're bound to find in abandoned playgrounds.

How's Georgia? I ask.

Waiting, says Ash.

Laney?

Waiting. And you?

I shrug: Waiting.

* * *

In my dreams, she never grows old. I suppose time exists in dreams only in name, a hollow term for something intangible, unrealistic, beyond physical influence; a four-letter word without meaning, an empty box, just a word and nothing more. Maybe time also sleeps when we do, tucking an arm under its head, or curling into a ball, like a cat.

If time sleeps, what does it dream of?

I like to think that the world of dreams is real: a patch of land curtained off from the rest of the world, from the eyes of the realists, from the eyes of those whose feet never leave the ground. The place that time forgot: sounds quaint, doesn't it? Hear ye, hear ye. Come and visit the Place That Time Forgot. Stretch your limbs and close your eyes, come with us, follow the light, leave everything behind. Forget your problems and live here, where time doesn't flow, where emotions run together in puddles by your shoe, where everything has no name, where everyone has no face.

Let's dream together, you and me, and if we're lucky, by the time we wake up we're already dead.

* * *

Ash glances at his watch and then at me. He's wearing a suit, stiff and charcoal gray, with three buttons down the front. His hair is combed away from his face, smoothed away, like a baron's, like an old man's. If he wears a top hat and a fits a monocle on his eye, he may as well be a caricature from the distant past.

Still lost in thoughts? he says.

I think so, I say.

All right. I'll wait for you.

Might take a while.

You always take a while. I'm used to it.

* * *

Every other day I rekindle the hope that she still loves me, wherever she is now. The hope dies and dies again, in a loop I manipulate, turning into ashes as the flame sputters. I blame Howard, with his cheap paperback romances, all of them wrinkled and soggy now, the pages fused with each other. I admit I have always been fond of the rose-tinted glasses, although one of the lenses is missing as of late.

* * *

I received the letter on the twenty-first of August, some eight years ago, sometime around midday, when the clock-hands spread out and pointed in two opposite directions. With casual ease Dirk handed me the envelope, an ordinary one, with no distinguishing features whatsoever.

I don't know how or why, but somehow I knew it had something to do with her.

To this day I could only recall phrases from it, from that letter. The paper I remember well: it was thick, smooth, creamy, twice folded; the stuff official documents are made of, said Ayame later. I skimmed over it and picked up the parts that mattered. It's what people do, I'm told, when they're anxious for news.

_We regret to inform you … August nineteenth … carbon monoxide poisoning … Flowerbud County Medical Hospital … sincerest condolences._

She had listed me as next of kin. I think I cried.

* * *

As time travels further, it begins to take a shape of its own, depending on what we want it to be. It's shaped, I think, like her.

* * *

It amused me, in an ambiguously morbid way, how the letter had slid around the word "suicide" and implied it instead, sprinkling subtle hints between the lines. It was carved into the print, within the monospaced type, in the blackness of the ink and the velveteen of the paper, under the bars and inside closed spaces: She killed herself. Invisible yet distinctly audible, as if branded into the rustling of the page.

I was glad that she hadn't decided to slit her wrists instead. When I picture the gleaming razor blade poised upon that pastel wrist, turned up to the light, crossing the blue-and-purple veins, slicing through the skin, parting it like a mouth, like a red zipper, blood oozing behind it, a trail of dark red blood, almost shining, almost glittering, trickling, dripping—no, I couldn't. Blood is one thing to see, _her_ blood is another.

In the end, though, does it really matter? She's gone. She would've been gone, either way. She's the kind of person who likes taking matters in her hands: she wanted the easy way out; she got it. I only wish she'd taken me with her.

* * *

It's time, says Ash. Ready?

I nod. Ready as I'll ever be.

Cheer up, he says. We can't have the groom moping around on his wedding day.

This better? I ask, smiling; it hurts my cheeks to smile. I'm out of practice, I suppose.

You don't have to do this, you know.

I know.

* * *

I might as well just come out and say it: I loved Lillian. I still do. I don't know how she did it; I could not recall the exact moment when our friendship nudged the border, when the simple companionship bloomed from under our noses. It confounds me sometimes, how gradual feelings can be, how stealthily they can move. They sneak on you and grab you from behind, and you could only yelp and wail, Why me? But you're already too far in and there's no other way to go but forward.

I think she loved me too, in her own roundabout way. She loved me, and I loved her, but in the end, neither of us loved each other right. We shot and we missed. We stepped around each other and went on walking, stiffly, not looking back. Like asymptotes, we grew closer and closer, but we never touched. There was a gap between us, a gulf of infinite differences and misunderstandings, and the love we shared was not enough to form a bridge, a link, a twisted rope, anything to close the distance and bring us together.

I suppose not everyone gets their happy ending.

* * *

She's smiling through the veil. Her eyes are shining with tears, both of happiness and sadness. She knows it, she knows why I'm doing this, she's not stupid, she's not dense. She's known from the start.

She seems so far away. I'm holding both her hands in mine, small dainty hands they are, soft as butter, but it's as if I'm peering at her from the wrong end of a telescope. I see my hands, our entwined fingers, I see my polished shoes, but it's all distant, all of it, that I start to think this is nothing but a bad dream.

Maybe this isn't real after all. Maybe I'm on vacation, touring the Place That Time Forgot with a pair of binoculars slung around my neck, a camera in my hands, a tomorrow to look forward to.

The notion is gone too soon. This is real, my brain tells me. This is happening. Pull yourself together.

I smile back at her.

She slides the golden band into my finger. It's cold.

With this ring, she says, I thee wed. Wear it as a symbol of our love and commitment.

In so much as the two of you have agreed to live together in Matrimony, says Nathan, have promised your love for each other by these vows, the giving of these rings and the joining of your hands, I now declare you to be husband and wife.

He pauses, stares at us in turn. You may now seal the promises you have made to each other with a kiss.

I lift the flimsy veil and take her face in my hands. She's crying now, muffling the sobs, green eyes rimmed red, and from somewhere to my left I hear Howard sniffling. It's supposed to be a happy occasion, this, but for some reason their tears remind me of a funeral.

My funeral. Bury me while I'm alive. Let me be, please let me be. Leave me to rot in my sorrow.

I kiss her and think of a dead woman.

* * *

Whoever said memories last forever must have never tried remembering. Memories grow transparent with the years, superimposed on top of another; eventually they all fade into one, a single stretch of time where everything happened at the same time. No distinction whatsoever, of yesterday, of tomorrow, of ten years ago. Everything is reduced into little memorial blocks with neat labels, all the same size, arrayed in a line.

I have nothing left of her but my memories, and even those will fade with time. I try shedding tears once in a while, in her honor, but nothing comes out. It's as if I've been wrung dry the day of her flight purgatoryward.

I still find it funny, that word. Purgatoryward. Of course, the day I coined it I had no idea, but in hindsight, it might have been a foreshadowing of what was to come. If only I knew…

But what would I have done? Nothing, I suppose. Even now, years and years later, there's not much I can do about it. All I can do is hope that she's finally found whatever it is she's looking for, wherever she is, my broken porcelain doll.

I'll see you again someday, Lillian, but not today.

* * *

_Fin._

* * *

_**a/n:**_

_And that's the end of that. I hope it wasn't very sad. Thanks for reading, guys. I appreciate all the support, all the reviews, the subscriptions. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart._


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